We’ve also seen how effective social media can be in activism. Think about the importance of Twitter and Facebook during Arab Spring or even what’s going on right now with the #Kony2012 project as just a couple immediate examples.

But now, we’re also seeing these two venues combine. And it’s interesting to watch play out.

Anybody who has ever had the pleasure of moderating an online comment forum (like I’ve done in various ways for the past 8 to 9 years) knows that the Internet has an interesting way of bringing out people’s inner comic and inner (or not-so-inner) sarcasm. When you combine the ability to comment in new ways that the Web 2.0/social media movement has created with this sarcasm, then mix that with the news of the day, the results can be fascinating.

Here’s two recent examples:

*In November, a controversy erupted at UC Davis when a member of the campus police force used pepper spray on students participating in an Occupy protest on campus. As an interesting side effect, that incident (combined with a statement by Fox News’ Meghan Kelly that pepper spray is “a food product, essentially”) caused people to hunt out the particular type of pepper spray used in the incident. Turns out, a similar type of spray is available for sale on Amazon. Amazon lets people post reviews about products. As a result, the spray received hundreds of reviews in days. “It really is the Cadillac of citizen repression technology,” says one rave review. “I thought I was getting the full peppery flavour with my previous brand of pepper spray but now I know what I was missing out on,” said another.

Those are just recent examples, but this sort of thing has been around for a while. If a business owner in a major city receives negative coverage in the press, odds are pretty good they could receive some negative review on sites like Yelp. And for years the conservative website Free Republic has made it a practice to bombard online polls in order to get heavily skewed results favorable to their opinion. (“freeping”)

I’d say, at this point, that social media managers, and all marketers, have to create plans for dealing with this potential social media backlash that goes beyond standard Facebook/Twitter post complaints. It’s a whole different ballgame, and not one that can really be solved by just shutting comments off and waiting for the problem to go away.

]]>https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/03/13/how-social-media-can-bring-out-the-smart-alecs-in-online-activism/feed/0robertlahueHow it’s going wrong on cyberbullying in Indianahttps://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/how-its-going-wrong-on-cyberbullying-in-indiana/
https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/how-its-going-wrong-on-cyberbullying-in-indiana/#respondSun, 19 Feb 2012 06:37:26 +0000http://robertlahue.wordpress.com/?p=30The First Amendment makes things so darned hard sometimes for legislators at all levels of government. Good-intention legislation could just ramrod through with across-the-board bans on everything if you didn’t have to worry about free speech.

But good intentions have always made for quality road pavement. And this is ‘Murica. You’re allowed to talk bad about things without being thrown in jail. But that still doesn’t stop legislation that tends to forget that from coming up now and again.

“The bill would allow Indiana public schools to punish students who do or say anything that might “reasonably be considered to be an interference with school purposes or an educational function,” including otherwise legal speech off campus.”

How does it do that?

“Students can already be reprimanded by their schools for illegal activities, such as trafficking illegal substances.

But HB 1169 would omit the word “illegal” from current law.”

The legislator who wrote the bill, State Rep. Eric Koch, said the intent of the bill is to — wait for it — prevent cyberbullying. Although, as the Daily Student and Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette pointed out, the term cyberbullying never shows up in the bill.

Really? I couldn’t tell, because all I can see is something that gives school administrators carte blanche to kick students out of school for anything they want. Throwing the word “reasonable” in there doesn’t work. I guaranteed it will get abused, and in a hurry.

And let’s be honest. The biggest target in cyberbullying? Social media. Let’s imagine something like this:

@TypicalTeenager: I hate my math teacher!!!! I really don’t want to go to school tomorrow…

This bill, in addition, would give school officials
grounds to suspend a pupil or recommend a pupil for
expulsion for bullying, including, but not limited
to, bullying by electronic act.

You can’t cyberbully without electronics.

It’s very simple. The best way to approach these situations — always — is to determine the absolute bare minimum you need to push the boundaries in order to achieve the desired result. Use a fine chisel to shape this kind of law, don’t dynamite your way to progress.

]]>https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/how-its-going-wrong-on-cyberbullying-in-indiana/feed/0robertlahueGood reads on social mediahttps://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/good-reads-on-social-media/
https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/good-reads-on-social-media/#respondFri, 17 Feb 2012 23:31:50 +0000http://robertlahue.wordpress.com/?p=28Here’s links to some of the interesting reads on social media I saw this week, or were passed along to me from other college/journalism social media folks:

]]>https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/17/good-reads-on-social-media/feed/0robertlahueMy rugby league pitchhttps://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/my-rugby-league-pitch/
https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/my-rugby-league-pitch/#respondSat, 11 Feb 2012 07:20:48 +0000http://robertlahue.wordpress.com/?p=17Apologies in advance for the Creed you will hear by playing this video

If you’re like me, there was a little sad spot in your heart after the Super Bowl ended. Yes, even though the game managed to be incredibly boring when it all came down to it and resulted in a classic example of a bad marketing stunt on the part of a website. Maybe that’s cynicism on my part for being a 49ers fan.

But, no matter how blah I felt while watching the game, I still had to watch. I could care less who won (For everybody who remembers all the Patriots gear I wore in high school, let me clarify: the Bledsoe-era Patriots I liked. The Belichick/Mr.Gisele-era Pats, not so much), but this was going to be the last football until August.

It’s interesting how football fans go about dealing with the offseason. Sure, there’s basketball. I lost count of how many friends posted messages on Facebook right about the Super Bowl counting down how many days until pitchers and catchers report.

Me, I turn my attention south. No, not the Cactus League. I go really, really far south. Down under, to be exact. Yes, football season is over, but the National Rugby League is getting ready to start, mate! G’day!

I accidentally came across rugby league just shy of a decade ago, back with the NRL would stream match replays for free. I was pretty much hooked right away because it was so much like football, but went at a faster pace and had so many exciting plays packed into an 80-minute running clock. It almost seemed like I had found this secret that nobody else knew about. At least in my little corner of California.

But, I’m convinced that if people in America really gave watching the NRL a shot, they’d be hooked. In fact, here are my reasons that I think rugby league would be popular in the US:

1) It’s a lot like football: The general assumption about rugby, no pads and it seems like everybody piles on top of a guy when he gets tackled. Well, not always. See, there’s actually two different forms of rugby: There’s rugby union (which is what you’re thinking of, those “piles” are called rucks, btw), and then there’s rugby league, which is the subject of this post. League acts a little more like football, in that each team has “sets” of tackles, which can be thought of like downs in football. The NRL also marks their rugby league pitches with lines every 10 meters, so it even looks fairly similar to a football field.

2) A celebrity owner: How many major sports teams in America are owned by celebrities? Yes, Jay-Z owns a little piece of the New Jersey Nets, but it’s still mostly the Russian guy. Meanwhile, the storied South Sydney Rabbitohs are owned by none other than Russell Crowe. Yes, that Russell Crowe. “Gladiator”, “Master & Commander”, “Cinderella Man” Russell Crowe. He purchased the Rabbitohs in 2006, which was fascinating in and of itself because the team, like most Australian sports and unlike every major American sports team except the Green Bay Packers was publicly owned by dues-paying members. That public membership had to take a public vote in order for Crowe to become the owner. Overall, this probably is a little higher up the celebrity sports ownership ladder than when Bon Jovi and John Elway owned Arena football teams.

4) All-star games that actually mean something: The Pro Bowl is a joke. NHL All-Star games have about 24 goals. The purpose of the NBA All-Star game is to show how little defense you can play. And for a baseball game to end in a tie, you either have to be in Klamath Falls or be in an All-Star. Rugby League has the State of Origin matches, in which the best players from the states of Queensland and New South Wales face off. And thesethingsareintense.

5) More reasons to love/hate Rupert Murdoch: The man who brought you Fox News also had a pretty major influence on rugby league back in the mid/late 90s. The details can be read in this Wikipedia entry on the Super League war, but the Reader’s Digest version is: Murdoch wanted to broadcast Australian Rugby League games on his TV stations. He couldn’t. So he convinced a bunch of ARL teams break off and form a new league. The dispute caused salaries to skyrocket, the two leagues eventually called a truce, the NRL was created. Hey, can’t hack celebrities’ phones all the time.

I don’t know if anybody will actually want to watch rugby league after I wrote this, but at least I got a chance to make my case.

So, did I convince anybody?

]]>https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/my-rugby-league-pitch/feed/0robertlahuecroweIs society numbing to photo manipulation?https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/is-society-numbing-to-photo-manipulation/
https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/is-society-numbing-to-photo-manipulation/#respondWed, 08 Feb 2012 06:33:25 +0000http://robertlahue.wordpress.com/?p=10Being that I know a lot of people still in or connected to the newspaper business, I’m still usually pretty in the loop when it comes to news of the media world, especially when it comes to newspapers in northern California.

So, the big story out of that neck of the woods was the sacking of long-time Sacramento Bee photographer Bryan Patrick for photo manipulation.

First, a reader alerted the Bee that a photo Patrick took of egrets during a bird festival in Galt may have been manipulated because the same plants showed up the background. As it turned out, the reader was right: Patrick had combined two photos into one more interesting image. The Bee suspended Patrick and began doing reviews of his past work if he had done this in any other cases. When two more manipulated photos turned up in that review — removing his shadow from one and enlarging flames of a wildfire in another — that was essentially, three strikes, you’re out.

Inside the journalism word, the opinion is pretty much unanimous that Patrick committed serious ethical violations and deserved to be fired. (One comment I saw via Facebook was “If you want to create art, open an art gallery”) The Bee’s comment section? Not so much. The amount of people commenting that they didn’t think the manipulations were such a big deal is pretty substantial.

A sampling of such comments (spelling errors their own):

“This is rediculous. By your own description of the issues above, he did nothing more than edit his work for clarity, something you would require of a writer.”

“Since when does it impede honesty to remove a shadow from a photo???? The moment wasn’t rewritten and history wasn’t altered because a SHADOW was removed. Welcome to the world of photoshop. The NFL had to get used to allowing officials the option to review calls via instant replay – and so, too, will the Bee have to find ways to accommodate the changing times and our new digital world.”

“Who cares if he manipulated a photo of a bird with frog, or enlarged flames of fire for a competition. Jesus there are REAL problems in this world and the major Sacto fishwrap is worried about this?!?”

As you can see, not all Photoshopping is totally blatant. (hat tip verydemotivational.com)

If you think about it, that’s kind of scary.

I believe this is partially due to Photoshop. The type of manipulations that Patrick performed, and more, are now possible by anybody willing to spend $200 on the popular visual editing program. Where as once upon a time these types of effects took eons of time and knowledge, now anybody can use a down weekend and learn all the egret manipulations your heart desires.

Heck, Photoshop has managed to make it into that rarest of positions that is reserved only for the software programs and websites that have truly embedded themselves into society and culture: Photoshop is both a noun AND a verb. It’s no longer “make a photo illustration.” Now you “Photoshop it.”

Maybe, on the surface, making flames bigger and changing the neck position of an egret doesn’t seem like something calamitous to do. But what is newspaper photography but trying to show an image of what’s going on? How are you doing that if you adding, taking away and changing what’s in the picture?

For example, I have an assignment coming up where I’m going to take photos of a basketball game at my college. The student government has made a big push for a “blackout” where everybody shows up wearing black. Let’s say the stands only wind-up half-full, but I go ahead and use my copy of Photoshop and duplicate a few extra cheering students in there. Or I combine two groups of close-up into one giant close-up?

I’m no longer giving you an accurate depiction of what happened at the game. I’m giving you a sorta-accurate depiction of the game. Yeah, those students were there. But they weren’t there in the way I’m making you think they were. Isn’t that lying?

In journalism, there is no sorta-accurate. There’s not supposed to be an gray area. It’s either accurate, or it’s not. And photography, unlike writing, has a very clear analysis of when something become accurate or inaccurate. Patrick’s photos went past that. So he had to go.

Just because the average Joe has the power to do something, doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone to do it. Unfortunately, now that the power to do powerful photo manipulations is in the hands of everybody, the right and wrong to people at large appears to have been muddied.

]]>https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/is-society-numbing-to-photo-manipulation/feed/0robertlahuedemotivational-posters-not-shoppedThe last few months…https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/the-last-few-months/
https://robertlahue.wordpress.com/2012/02/04/the-last-few-months/#commentsSat, 04 Feb 2012 04:53:51 +0000http://robertlahue.wordpress.com/?p=5Well, I’ve decided to switch my blogging over here to a WordPress-hosted blog. I’m still keeping my RobertLaHue.com website, but it will be more oriented toward displaying work samples and the like.

Why the change? Well, a few reasons. But primarily, there’s been a few major changes in my life that are going to require some changes in my blogging.

Career change: If you had told me six years ago that I would be doing something besides journalism, I would have said you were crazy. I also would have said you were crazy six years ago that there would be paying jobs on those things I spent a ton of time on like MySpace and Facebook.

So much for that.

I’ve left journalism, and now work as the social media coordinator for Chemeketa Community College in Oregon. The primary campus of the college is in Salem, the state capital, along with another full campus in McMinnville and additional locations in the communities of Woodburn, Dallas, Brooks, and our Center for Business and Industry in downtown Salem. So, to sum up: new job in a new state in a new line of work.

Of course, social media is just one part of the job. There’s a lot to go with that: